


In Perfect Light

by sevenofspade



Category: DCU - Comicverse
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-25
Updated: 2013-06-25
Packaged: 2017-12-16 04:32:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/857818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenofspade/pseuds/sevenofspade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stephanie Brown, Blue Lantern of Sector 2814, investigates the disappearance of its Green Lantern.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Perfect Light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amathela](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amathela/gifts).



> I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.
> 
> I have made several changes between the Lantern Corps as presented in DC comics and those presented in this fic. Most notably: their scope of action is limited to this galaxy and all Lantern Corps were founded somewhat simultaneously (and are all based of Oa). Those changes are deliberate, and I hope they do not prevent you from enjoying the fic.
> 
> Much thanks is owed to [vtn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/vtn) for betaing, despite lack of canon knowledge. This fic would have more technobabble in it without them, and any remaining mistakes are mine alone.

It’s been five years since Steph’s been to Earth.

She doesn’t think about it often, but it hits her, occasionally. Her mother could have had an overdose by now, her father could be in jail again and she could be on missing posters across town. But let’s face it, she’s from Gotham; of the three, only the first two are likely.

It’s been five years since Steph’s been to Earth, so it’s a bit of a surprise when her next assignment takes her there.

As a native, she’s tasked with finding out what happened to the Green Lantern of Sector 2814. Not just the person, but the actual ring of power too. The ring is in fact her primary objective: ascertain whether it is damaged, destroyed or disappeared. If the ring is already bonded, she and its bearer are to return to Oa immediately. If the ring is not bonded, she is to return with it at once to Oa.

Earth has been declared a necessary casualty.

It’s ridiculous, the war might not even have made it to Earth yet - the signal got lost after Abin Sur crashed there, which could mean anything from Lagrange point interference to solar flares to fucking Jedis for all anyone knows. But war is war and but if it has, well then... Steph does not like to think about it. It pains her a bit to think about her home planet without hope and cut off from the rest of the galaxy, but that's what Lanterns do. They make the hard choices so the rest of the universe might live.

She’ll burn that bridge when she gets there. Which should only take her a week at the rate she’s going. Only a week. Fuck, when did she start thinking like an Earth girl again? A week is an eternity in the galaxyscape.

It’s taking her a week, because Earth is lost on the outskirts of the galaxy and tripping the light fantastic can only take her as far as the farthest Lantern. Just as well -- compressing herself into a light signature and rebounding through nineteen rings has already given her knots in her shoulders the size of fists.

She’ll never admit it to anyone, but Steph loves the Long Dark. There’s something soothing about going ever faster between stars, cocooned in blue. The recursive pulse propulsion sends pleasant shivers all down her spine. Sometimes, though, she just stops and takes in the glory of it all. Softly spinning accretion disks and shuddering novae, binary systems dancing their endless dance, the gentle pull of collapsars, gossamer nebulae and the too rare beauty of gamma ray bursts, all drifting across the forever space of the cosmos.

It slows her down considerably, of course.

She doesn’t just lose the time it takes to admire the gloriousness of the universe, she also loses both the time it takes her to get back to speed and whatever time she would have won by keeping on accelerating. It’s a deliberate choice she makes and she makes it less and less as the War rages on. There is no longer time for beauty.

Earth might be a backwater with six Lanterns to its name in the history of the Corps, but that doesn’t preclude them having space-based defenses. (Never again through the hassle B’har Prime was. Lasers fucking hurt, man.)

They don’t and Steph isn’t sure how to feel about that. The War is coming and they’re sitting ducks. On the other hand, there is zero risk she’ll end up in a restorative coma this time.

She still slows down in the vicinity of Saturn, landing next to a silver plaque on the Moon. “We come in peace,” it reads, “for all mankind.” There are deep grooves through it, as though someone has tried to rip it out of its rightful place. Steph lays her hand on it, smoothing it out. She feels a jolt of energy and something flinching inside of her.

“We come in peace for all mankind.” Would that it were true. Steph fights this War on the frontlines. Still. The words sound like home.

When she became a Lantern, Steph didn’t get a chance to look at the Earth. She foolishly thought she’d be back right after she gave the ring back.

She takes a good look at it now. White clouds surround a blue globe and there is a hurricane hitting the Atlantic North-West.

Well, then. That certainly makes deciding how to proceed a lot easier.

Steph rushes down, dodging a weather satellite on her way down. Water and wind are battering the city, might be New York, at increasingly dangerous speed. Steph throws up a shield, bigger, stronger and brighter than she ever has and faces the storm.

There’s a kid falling from a high-rise building. Steph grabs her out the air, widening the shield with her mind. A woman narrowly escapes getting crushed by falling debris when Steph pulls her up. The shield strengthens.

She’s never going to be able to hold that shield for the duration of the storm. It’s just not humanly possible. Good thing she isn't human anymore.

There are other people taking care of the civs now, so she goes back to holding off the superstorm.

She’s once hold off the entire combined might of both the Ashrak and the Jahil. This is worse. You can’t reason with a storm, can’t ask it to stop while you talk things out, can’t overload its canons so they stop working, can’t stall for time, can’t expect the rest of the Corps to show up and help.

So she just stands there, for the time it takes for the storm to die out, throwing all her hope that no one dies on her watch into the battle.

She crumples, exhausted, when the storm is over.

Some hot guy with a bright smile and a black and blue suit catches her. It’s a nice thought, but she doesn’t need it. She’s a fucking Lantern, she doesn’t need help from random non-powered humans, or even random powered humans.

The ringing in her head is fine-tuning itself to a sharp pitch centered around the Mexico/New Mexico/Texas border. The fuck is the Reach? “I have an alien invasion to foil, if you’ll excuse me.”

She departs right away and loops around the globe once or twice to shake off any additional surveillance bugs he left on her.

Whatever or whoever the reach is or are, the signal is coming from El Paso, Texas.

The ring is telling her to hack and slash and talk things out later. Like fuck she’ll listen. She’s a person, not a puppet. If it wants her to attack, it’ll have to do more than scream ‘reach! attack! attack!’ at her.

There’s a black-and-blue-body-armour-wearing winged teenaged boy flying over the town. He’s the one earning all the screeching from her ring.

“A word, please,” she says, trusting the ring to carry the words to him.

She raises her shield as he aims a cannon at her. He seems conflicted, the cannon fluctuating between sonic and not and he’s muttering under his breath.

He’s arguing with himself that he shouldn’t kill her. Okay, then. Not that she doesn’t agree - she quite likes being alive - but what is going on?

“Sorry about that,” he says. “The suit didn’t come with a manual.”

“Have you decided if you want to kill me yet?” She just had a gun pointed at her head, she’s allowed to be a bit mean.

“Yes,” he says and Steph readies a light-staff. “I mean, yes, I’ve decided, and no, I don’t want to kill you.”

Steph lands. She dissolves the staff, but keeps the specs close at hand, just in case. “Are you trying to invade?”

“I’m not invading anything.”

Steph isn’t convinced. It must be the ring’s influence. It’s gotten really weird lately. “Let’s say I believe you. Why would I do that?”

“Why are you even here? Who are you? Are you trying to invade?”

Turnabout is fair play, Steph supposes. “I’m a Blue Lantern, of the Oan Lantern Corp. Think of us as a galactic police force.”

“What and I just take your word for it? The Scarab is telling me not to trust you.”

Of course it is. “So’s my ring. Do you see me trying to kill you?”

And they have a stand-off. The first one to attack will shatter any hope of a truce and gain the advantage. Between the two of them, they could raze this town to the ground.

“Stephanie Brown,” she says finally.

“What?” His wings snap open.

“Stephanie Brown. That’s my name, look me up. I disappeared in Gotham five years ago. This,“ she holds up her hand with the ring, “is responsible.”

“Somebody put a ring on it?” He’s laughing. He stops when he realises she isn’t joining him. “Not a Beyonce fan?”

Steph is so used to being the one whose references people don’t get that it takes her a moment to realise that pop culture has marched on while she was away. “Never mind that. I’m looking for a crash site, dating roughly three months back.” It’s not a lie, per se, but it’s not the truest thing she ever said, either. “Help me out, and I’ll see what I can do about this manual you’re missing.”

Oa has to have at least a vague outline of what Reach warriors can do, right?

“You can do that?” Even through the mask-like thing on his face, his smile is blinding.

Steph nods. She takes off towards the desert while he goes off to the town. When she’s five miles out, she turns herself invisible and doubles back, invisible.

With the ring’s help, she can ‘see’ Scarab Dude’s heat signature and suppress her own.

She follows him home. Nice job with the stalker tendencies, Steph.

He boots his computer and looks her up. Steph takes the opportunity to memorise his wifi password, whatever wifi is. Wifi is apparently Internet without cables, which works out great for her.

He doesn’t find anything, which Steph takes to mean he doesn’t know how to use the Internet. This is confirmed when he calls over his friend Paco to help him search.

While he - Jaime - researches a paper on quinine, Steph looks for Abin Sur’s crash site. The ring connects to the Internet like she hoped it would and the MIB/SSA/Alphabet Soup have something for her.

“A space cop lady from Gotham? They have space cops in Gotham? They have cops in Gotham?” That would most likely be Paco.

He’s hilarious.

Stephanie takes a brief look at the heading from the report the ring brought up and decides this too big to handle alongside invisibility. She rushes out to the desert and blows up the report over ten feet of orange rock.

“Extraterrestrial lifeform” flashes by followed by “Area 51” which, for real? Who comes up with these code names? Then is “Justice League” and “reverse engineering attempts” and a very detailed autopsy report of Abin Sur but nothing on the ring. There is, however, “trace exotic particle radiation”. That she can work with.

In the subfolder “Crossreference”, there is a list of suspicious disappearances and murder scenes listed, in order of death/last seen: Jessica Cruz, Alan Scott, Guy Gardner, Jennifer-Lynn Hayden, Kyle Rayner, Simon Baz, Anya Savenlovich, Charlie Vicker, Hal Jordan, John Stewart, Donna Parker, Daniel Young...

Whoa, back up, what was that last one? Donna Parker, the only other living Earth Lantern, one of the very few retired Lanterns (with your shield or on it) and Abin Sur’s predecessor. Steph wishes she could have met her. Her appearance on the list throws a new light on everything.

There had been rumours that prospective Lanterns and retired Lanterns were also being targeted. Steph never believed them because rumours say a lot of things. They say once upon a time, they didn’t have children in the Corp. They say a long time ago, people danced on the stars. The things people say are interesting, but Stephanie is more interested in the things they don’t say.

No one talks about it, but everyone knows that something about the formal bonding ceremony on Oa makes the Lanterns weaker than they would otherwise have been, weaker than they’d been before. They’re all affected, but Blue Lanterns most of all.

No one knows why and no one knows how. They do know that asking too many questions is a bad idea.

On Kelowna, they told Steph that Lantern rings have a very specific and nigh-undetectable radiation signature. More than that, they told her that a Lantern’s cellular make-up is forever altered by it, in an innocuous but as nigh-undetectable way.

Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that the radiation detected around the crime scenes and inside the bodies fits the radiation profile of a Green Lantern ring. The amount of radiation makes it unlikely that the ring was worn for longer than a couple of minutes.

Somebody is tracking down potential bearers for the ring and is so efficient at it, it’s broken through the most basic programming of the ring.

There are three types of people the ring never goes to in normal circumstances: retired Lanterns, people under ten and bearers of other-coloured rings.

If Donna was sought out, the ring has broken those imperatives.

That’s not really a concern right now. The most recent victim died three weeks ago and there’s been not a peep from the ring since, which means it’s been either successfully contained or destroyed. Steph’s not sure which would be worse.

Her ring tells her the green ring’s not destroyed. All rings are linked through a subspace foldmatrix, but fuck if Steph understands any of it. The only other thing it can tell her is in which direction the ring is.

She triangulates, trying several locations before returning to her start point. The ring is somewhere in El Paso. Awesome.

Team-up with Beetle Guy time.

She travels back to his house. It’s the next morning and she has a lie ready if she needs it. The ring can track down the Beetle because of reasons. It’s not a good lie. Good thing she doesn’t need it.

The house is empty, except for the sister.

“I saw you on TV,” the girl says, before Steph can leave.

“Where’s your brother?” Steph asks, because hey, might as well.

The girl squints. “Are you going to get Jaime in trouble?”

Steph shrugs. Trouble’s a big word for it. She’s just dragging him into a war, no big. Steph’s been fighting this war and no one asked her if she wanted to. And why should they? Steph’s a soldier, fighting’s her purpose.

“You so are! You’re trouble, I knew it, I told him! Your ring’s sparkly.” She stops for air and Steph holds up her hand to look at her ring. It looks fine. “Well, fine, it’s not sparkly now, but it was. Also Jaime didn’t find you.”

Steph doesn’t say anything.

“There isn’t anyone called Stephanie Brown who disappeared in Gotham,” the girl continues. “Were you lying?”

“My name is Stephanie Brown,” she says on autopilot, mind flashing back to - Tetram, crashing the podlink servers in the yesha Milak comes from - bringing Amalla’s birth certificate to Oa -

\- and she snaps out of it, her ring burning sky blue , tiny azure sparks dancing across her skin. It’s very pretty and there’s no way she can be angry at anything so pretty and why should she be?

“I’m Milagro. What you want Jaime for, anyhow?”

Steph sits on the porch, legs stretched out in front of her. The sun is warm against her face and she enjoys its golden light, so different from the green light of Sto-Oa. It’s very nice, but it isn’t home. “I’m looking for a green ring, almost like mine.” She shapes the Green Lantern symbol in the air, at Milagro’s eye level. “It’s green,” she adds, because the symbol is blue.

“What’s it do?” Milagro asks.

Steph shrugs. “Same as mine, mostly.” Nine-year-olds are probably not the best people to discuss inter-Corps politics with.

“You’ve got a magic ring already. Why do you need another one?” Milagro waves her hand through the symbol, motes of light clinging to her fingers.

Steph thumps her chest. “This is my Lantern Corp uniform. Everywhere in the galaxy, it means ‘police’. Justice, fairness. Light in darkness. Hope,” she spreads her fingers over the symbol on her chest, “and help in all places.”

Milagro snorts. “So what went wrong?”

“The Guardians - City Hall - my bosses -” she adds, when Milagro makes a face, “wanted to expand, bring the Lanterns’ light to infinity and beyond.” Milagro grins and Steph smiles back. Fuck yeah, Buzz Lightyear. “Except, not everyone saw it that way. The people beyond, outside the reaches of Lantern Space, they didn’t think ‘help’ when they saw us. They thought ‘militia’. And from there, ‘armed forces’ and ‘invasion’. So now they’re trying to kill us, because they think we’re trying to kill them.”

“Are you trying to kill them?” Milagro asks. Out of the mouth of babes.

Steph’s teeth are clenched tight against her answer and she forces it out, through the lump in her throat. “Yes.” Milagro is it front of her now and how did she get there? Her eyes are wide and worried and Steph can see herself reflected in them, the electric blue of her own eyes visible even against the brown of Milagro’s. “We’re trying to kill them. That’s the point of war.”

Milagro looks at Steph’s ring, then at Steph, then back at the ring. “Take it off,” she says.

“What.” It’s not even a question. Steph knows what Milagro wants her to take off, she’s just not doing it.

“The ring. Take it off.”

This time, Steph doesn’t stop herself and no-way-s so hard she’s half a mile above ground before she realises that ‘no way’ isn’t a verb. She could drift back down, but she decides to keep going instead. She bursts through the stratosphere, hair trailing behind her like a comet.

In the mesosphere, she swerves around the aurora. It’s prettier than the ones on Belken, although smaller.

She makes it into the thermosphere, shooting by the International Space Station and then she stops. She retraces her flight and figures, why not? She knocks on the closest window.

Predictably, it takes a while for anyone to answer.

It’s worth it just to see their faces.

She doesn’t expect to be invited in, but since she has it’d be rude to refuse.

The inside of the station is cramped, but they have delicious tea. Drinking through a straw is weird as hell, though. “I was just passing by,” Steph says.

They don’t look convinced. Fair enough. In their place Steph wouldn’t be convinced either.

“I was wondering,” she starts, “if there have been any strange happenings lately?”

“Aside from space-worthy teenaged girls?” This astronaut is short, the spacesuit a bit too big for her. “Are you with the JLA?” Steph nods, whatever the JLA is. The astronauts visibly relax. “There was the green meteor three months ago.” The others nod. “And okay, maybe this is just me, but sometimes there’s this green sheen, like the northern lights on steroids.”

The big guy, red hair and tan skin, draws a circle in the air with his finger. “I’ve seen those too. Thought it was just the new glass they used on the windows.”

Steph finishes her tea. “When’s the last time that happened?”

The last person in the station, a tall woman with long dark hair, points at the window. “Right now.”

“Thank you for the tea,” Steph says and leaves. She cannot see the green sheen the astronauts spoke off, until the sun is behind the Earth and a green ring of light surrounds it, like a diseased corona. It looks a bit like Mogo, if Mogo was bigger and suffused in a failing, sickly glow.

Actually... it’s not the glow around the Earth that’s failing, it’s her ring.

Fuck.

She drops like a meteor, complete with burnout upon atmospheric reentry.

There’s enough charge left in the ring for her to stir her course into a skip reentry trajectory. Then she shields herself and braces for impact. The ring can make sure she survives a crash landing in the desert, but at this speed crashing in the ocean will have the same bone-shattering impact and the ring can’t last more than ten seconds after impact and she’ll never be able to swim back up to the surface before the pressure kills her.

It hurts like hell, but she’s alive.

Blue Beetle leans over her, how did he get there, he’s speaking, she can’t hear a thing, her head is pulsing and everything is fading to black.

The black fades out to reveal the inside of a house. Steph sits up, still sore. The fabric of her costume rustles and--

\--her ring is gone.

She’s wearing the majority of her Spoiler costume. She never got around to actually wearing it to fight crime, she found the ring just before she put on the cape for the first time. And her ring is still gone.

She has no idea where she is, her uniform vanished when her ring lost power and her ring is gone.

“In fearful day,” she starts, “in raging night,” deep breaths, Steph, “with strong hearts full,” this will work, “our souls ignite,” it has to work, “when all seems lost in the War of Light,” she can’t quite deal with what it means if it doesn’t work, “look to the stars,” she doesn’t know how to be anything but a Blue Lantern, “for hope burns bright!”

She has no idea who Stephanie Brown is if she’s not a Lantern. She keeps repeating the Blue Lantern Oath over and over again.

“What’s it mean?” That’s Milagro, she got into the room when Steph wasn’t looking.

Steph stops her litany. “What’s it mean what?”

“That thing you’ve been repeating on loop.” Milagro is copying Steph’s voice, pitched low in her throat. “Infearfulday inragingnight withstrongheartsfull oursoulsignite whenallseemslostinthewaroflight looktothestars forhopeburnsbright.”

Milagro comes up for air and it hits Steph that the only times she ever thought of Earth back on Oa was when she saw the names of her predecessors in the Hall of Lanterns. She never wanted to go home again, because Earth wasn’t home and home was Oa. That’s not right, she’s from Earth, not Oa, but she’s a Lantern, she belongs to Oa but her head feels like a swarm of insects are laying siege to the inside of her skull, insects with sharps pincers and nukes, ow.

Breathe, Stephanie.

Take it one step at a time. Answer Milagro’s questions first, then your own. “It’s the Blue Lantern Oath. Blue Lanterns use it to power our rings.”

Milagro nods, as though that explains something to her. Maybe it does. Her brother’s a superhero, after all. “Is it the only thing that works? Are there other Oaths? Do the other Lanterns have Oaths? What’s the Green Lantern Oath? How many Lanterns are there?”

Steph breaths. This is easy, she knows this. “No. Yes. Yes. The usual version of the Green Lantern Oath is ‘In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil's might, Beware my power, Green Lantern's light!’ although there exists sevreal official variants and several unofficial ones. There are seven Lantern Corps and 823 543 Lanterns at present.”

Milagro crinkles her nose. “Your Oaths suck.”

“Your face sucks,” Steph says, sticking her tongue out. “Where’s my ring?”

“I know you think there’s a war coming, but you should chillax about the ring thing,” Milagro says. The fuck does chillax mean? Kids these days.

“You don’t understand,” Steph says, “the war isn’t coming. It’s already here.”

Milagro stretches out her arms up above her head and yawns. Steph hears something pop in her spine. “That’s dramatic. Is it real?”

“Why do you keep thinking I’m lying?” Steph asks.

“Not lying, just confused.” Milagro is opening the blinds. Through the opening, the sun is bright.

“I’m confused because why aren’t you in school?” Because seriously, that’s two days in a row Milagro is alone at home in the middle of the day.

“Day off yesterday and we don’t have school until ten today.” Milagro’s face makes the appended ‘like, duh’ evident.

Steph nods. “How long was I out?”

“You crashed evening of yesterday, so about,” Milagro does some quick math under her breath, “eleven hours. Where did your clothes go?”

Eleven hours, she can still do something. She’s not sure what, but something. “Give me back my ring.”

“No.” Milagro’s fist is clenched tight and has been since she entered the room. “Tell me what happened to your clothes.”

“The ring provides a uniform. It lost power so the uniform is gone. Satisfied?” Steph tries to see what Milagro’s holding, but no dice.

“What are you?” Milagro asks. Steph doesn’t think she’s asking for her own benefit. “Who are you?”

“I’m a Blue Lantern.” That answers both of Milagro’s questions. Wait. No, it doesn’t. What’s going on? Her thoughts make no sense and her head hurts. “I’m Stephanie Brown and something’s wrong with my brain.”

“What do you think is wrong with your brain? Tell me about your mother.” Milagro’s fist loosens a bit in relief.

“What is this, a psych exam? Come on! ‘Tell me about your mother’, what are you, Sigmund Freud?” Steph is feeling better. She is Stephanie Brown, Blue Lantern of Earth. She says so.

Milagro pinches her lip, deep in thought.

“Jaime’ll be pissed but here, have your ring back.” Milagro opens her fists and there’s Steph’s ring, looking slightly worse for wear - or rather worse for fist clench carry, whatever.

Steph hurls herself through one more rendition of the Oath and the ring flies to her finger. “Why will Jaime be pissed?”

“Jaime doesn’t want you to have your ring back and also he says you think funny because of it, which yeah, you sound like Gollum a little. He and Khaji think your ring is evil.” Milagro pulls a face. “Non compatible, Khaji says.”

There’s no question why Jaime thinks the ring is evil. “Who’s Khaji?”

Milagro points at her back. “Khaji Da’s the scarab. He doesn’t like stuff that’s ‘non compatible’. I think he was messing with your ring but then Jaime stopped it. But then he must have said something because Jaime let it at the ring again.”

Steph launches a diagnostic of the ring’s systems but everything seems to be working. It feels different, less alien and more human, but she chalks that up to habit, withdrawal, any number of things.

“Tell Khaji,” here Steph trails off, because none of the things she wants to say to Khaji are suitable for a nine year old to hear. “Nevermind.”

Her uniform firmly settled around her body once more, Steph takes flight.

She takes a moment to revel in the glory of it then gets back to work, circling idly around the Earth several times, lost in thought. Her thoughts are sluggish, as though they don’t want to be thought.

If she were trying to contain a ring of power in El Paso, where would she do it?

Somewhere where no one would notice. No. Someone will notice something anyway. Someone always notices something. So. Somewhere where people will notice, but not be believed. Oh.

Steph turns back. It’s 11:37 AM and Milagro’s in school. So is the Green Lantern Ring. If a child says they saw a monster or a magic ring, no one‘ll believe them.

The school is in a panic when she gets there. Teachers are running around, scooping kids up and out of the way. Milagro is nowhere to be seen, neither is the cause of the panic. The schoolyard’s floor is bright green, growing brighter each passing second. Steph barely notices. She’s carrying children out, using her ring as a safety net. Milagro is still nowhere to be seen.

“What’s going on?” she asks one of the teachers as she grabs her with in a giant blue fist, along with two small children.

“There was a woman,” the teacher starts. “At least she looked like a woman, in the basement. Then she started talking to herself and her voice was different when she answered.”

“What did she say?” Steph deposits her cargo safely on the ground.

“‘The ring has been assimilated’ then ‘begin the attack on Oa’. That spunded like more than one person. After she said that she started glowing green.” The teacher is doing a headcount as she speaks and seems to like the result.

Goddamn hivemind, Steph thinks.

“Did she have a ring? Looks like this?” Steph fashions a Green Lantern ring in the air with her ring.

“I don’t know. I think so.” The teacher cracks her knuckles, but it looks more like stress-relief than a hit-me.

“Steph! Steph!” Milagro comes out of the crowd and Steph turns around. “Don’t look at me! Look at the school! Look!”

The school is glowing forest green, viridian light casting demented shadows over the grass. Out of the emerald inferno steps a figure. The outline of the woman is beautiful and any details of her are obscured by the shades of green pouring into her from outside, everything from teal to malachite, jade to olive, lime to chartreuse.

When all the green in the world has filled the space of her, the woman opens her mouth. “A Blue Lantern. How lovely.”

Her arm extends and Steph shatters into shards of light.

Blue Lanterns can power Green Lanterns and vice versa, Steph knows. But it’s supposed to be an equal relationship. This is not. This is a space vampire draining her of all her cobalt, all her indigo, all her cyan.

Steph pulls herself back together to fight, sky blue ribbons of hope holding together the haphazardly meshed sapphire splinters of her heart.

It hurts.

She kicks off the ground, punching her adversary in the face.

The ring dispassionately details her injuries for her, pain catalogued and filed away to be suffered later. The bones of her hand blast apart and her ulna breaks into pieces while her radius is driven into and through her elbow, bones there fragmenting. Her shoulder ruptures and her humerus pierces her skin.

Her arm is useless and all she’s done is exhaust herself. The other doesn’t have a scratch on her.

Steph puts the healing of her arm on hold, diverting the energy into a concussive blast.

The green of the shape is turning to turquoise, but she was flung backwards into the sky, so Steph hits her again and again.

Steph surrounds her broken arm with a cannon in lieu of a sling. She rifles through every kind of long-range attack she can think of: sonic, projectile, laser, plasma, electromagnetic pulse...

The more she hits it, the less effect it has and the more her own ring is depleted.

Steph’s ring fails and her uniform drops. The only light she can see throught the haze of pain is a perfect blend of blue and green.

Steph starts reciting the Oath, not caring who can hear. Clearly, the other does not need an oath to recharge. On ‘For hope burns bright!’ another voice joins hers.

“In brightest day, in blackest night,” Milagro is saying, her voice shaky and uncertain, “No evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil's might,” her voice grows more confident, as she remembers the words, “Beware my power, Green Lantern's light!”

She holds out her arm, hand outstretched, ribbons of verdant light flowing towards her, ringing her in a halo of green. The Other blanches and Steph copies Milagro, their Oaths overlapping.

Now, it’s the Other’s turn to attack, sending back to Steph everything she threw at it and more.

Steph raises a shield and makes herself a sling for her arm, still talking. The words are an unintelligible blur by now, but they still work.

Eventually, their foe dissolves into the bright red-orange light of the setting sun.

Steph collapses on the ground.

Milagro’s ring is see-through, the rest of it surrounding her like green motes of light. Her uniform shines a deep green below the light. It makes her look unreal, like a butterfly in glass case.

The sun sets behind the horizon, one last green flash burning away into the dark.

“You should make a ring,” Steph says. “Just... concentrate.”

Steph rises to her feet. She takes Milagro’s ringhand in hers and pain travels up her arm, bringing clarity in its wake.

On Oa, the war is raging. On Oa, they broke her mind apart and rebuilt it the way they wanted, turning the scared girl from Gotham into a warrior for the Light.

“Burn it away,” she tells Milagro. “Let it be just you inside your head.”

Milagro nods, turning the swirling light into a smooth green band around her finger. “There’s a war we have to fight.”

“We don’t have to,” Steph says. She was a warrior in Gotham too. “But we will. No one dies on my watch.”

Milagro takes flight. “Race you!” Her laugh is bright.

Steph smiles, and looks to the stars.

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from this quote: "Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; / I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.". It's from The Old Astronomer, by Sarah Williams.


End file.
